Tuesday, December 27, 2016

I predict that Singapore's move toward helping students develop their interests and talents will result in far more student learning and more satisfaction (
("Learning through life rather than exams";
Dec 27, 2016).

This was clear to the Greek philosopher Plato (The Republic, VIII, 7): "Compulsory physical exercise does no harm to the body, but compulsory learning never sticks in the mind ....".

Those who have developed encyclopedic knowledge and mastery of their fields did it through attempting to solve problems of great interest to them, not through "study."

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Original article: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/learning-through-life-rather-than-exams

Saturday, December 24, 2016

On Big Think, Bill Nye (The
Science Guy) advises us to "use your
critical thinking skills. Evaluate evidence. Don't believe everything you read
or see" (December 20, 2016). Mr. Nye is a good example of doing exactly
that, reading and evaluating evidence carefully from all sides of an issue. Except in one major case: The Common Core.

Mr. Nye is an enthusiastic supporter
of the Common Core standards, because, he says, there are some basic principles
everybody needs to know. On Big Think in September, 2014, he says that
everybody needs
to learn "a little bit of physics, chemistry, mathematics
and you got to learn some evolution. You've got to learn some biology ...
Everybody's got to learn the alphabet. Everybody's got to learn to read. The
U.S. Constitution is written in English so everybody's got to learn to read
English." (http://bigthink.com/videos/bill-nye-is-the-core-curriculum-the-antidote-for-creationism).

I
completely agree and I think that nearly all educators and parents agree. Mr. Nye says that the opposition to the common
core stems from teachers not wanting to teach subjects they are not very
interested in,and parents' concerns
that the content of the core might conflict with their beliefs.

But the
oppoition to the Common Core among professional educators is different:It is because the standards
that make up the official Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are
developmentally inappropriate, were created without sufficient consultation
with teachers and research on learning, and their validity has never even been
investigated.

In addition, the CCSS imposes a staggering amount of testing. despite research showing that
increasing testing does not increase achievement.

Finally, CCSS does not address the real problem in American education.Critics complain about our unspectacular
scores on international tests, but when researchers control for the effect of poverty, American
test scores are near the top of the world. Our unimpressive overall scores are
because the US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34
economically advanced countries (now over 20% nationally and around 80% in some
inner city school districts), compared to high-scoring Finland’s child poverty
level of 5%).

Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care,
and lack of access to books, among other things. Study after study confirms
that all of these have a profound negative impact on school performance. The
best teaching and best standards in the world will not help if students are
hungry, ill and have little access to books.

Instead of
protecting children from the effects of poverty, the common core cointinues to
invest billions in inappropriate and harmful standards, and useless testing.I suggest Mr.
Nye take a closer look at this issue.

As Ellen O'Neill notes in her letter (December 23, 2016), professional development for teachers is important for literacy development. But there is no crisis in professional development: The problem is poverty.
The poverty rate for public school students in the District of Colombia is among the highest in the country; this means few books in the home and few bookstores. As noted previously in the Post (March 9, 2015), DC's school libraries serving at-risk students suffer from a shortage of books and have few credential librarians. Clearly, many children in DC have very little access to reading material.
More access to books results in more reading, which in turn means better reading achievement.
The best professional development in the world will be worthless if students have little or nothing to read.

Stephen Krashen

"Helping English-Learners Break Through Language Plateaus" mentions every option except the only one that works: self-selected free voluntary reading. Decades of published research have shown that free voluntary reading is the source of exactly the competencies that this article describes.

Recent
studies support the idea that succcessful English language acquirers, those who
do not become long-term English learners, are those who develop a reading habit.
Also, the amount of free reading done is
an excellent predictor of performance on standardized tests used to determine
English proficiency.

In
contrast, there is no clear evidence that direct instruction and oral practice
are helpful.Direct instruction produces
conscious knowledge of language, which is hard to learn, hard to apply, and
hard to remember.Oral competence, it
has been argued, is the result of language acquisition, which happens only
through comprehensible input.

"Helping
English-Learners …" concludes with this statement: "School is the only
place many of our students are likely to hear, use, or produce academic
language, and to learn how context brings meaning to language."I maintain that books (and other reading
material) are the only place young people are likely to encounter the comprehensible
and interesting language that leads to full academic language competence.

Moses is a
charmer. He wears a perma-smile to match his unflappable sense of humor, is a
smooth talker, and a great sport with adults. He speaks English colloquially
with absolute savviness, much to the chagrin of many of his teachers, since
much of his conversational energy is directed at friends, girls, and racking up
cool points as he aims for social capital.

However, give him
a diagram to label, a writing assignment to complete, a reading passage to
summarize, and vocabulary to memorize, and it’s readily apparent that his
social language savvy does not equate to sophisticated academic language
proficiency.

At 16, he is
considered a long-term English-language learner (LTEL), although he has lived
in the United States since he was 1 year old. LTELs are students who have been
classified as English-language learners (ELLs) for more than six years, are
verbally bilingual, are below grade-level in reading and writing, and are at
high-risk for dropping out. Although there is no national data on LTELs, a high percentage of our secondary schools’
ELLs is considered long-term, with a myriad of literacy needs, including
mitigating their fossilized language habits.

Three Areas of Language Proficiency

Academic language
is an area teachers must target to help LTELs break through their plateaus. It
is worthwhile to note, however, that all learners are technically academic
language learners; teaching our content-area discourse patterns, vocabulary,
and structures will be “new” language if we aim for our students to speak like
historians, scientists, musicians, and other professionals.

Vocabulary usage
refers to what many call “academic language” or “accountable talk," the
specificity of words for a given content area or context. A critical
combination includes precise words (example or experience versus idea)
and high-utility words such as "consequence," "issue," or
"justification."

Linguistic
complexity refers to language production, the amount and quality of both oral
and written language, including organization and the use of increasingly
complex grammatical structures.

Language control
refers to the level of comprehensibility of the language used, the errors made,
and the extent to which those errors impact meaning. Control can include rate
of speech, grammatical constructs, accent, and choice of vocabulary.

Let’s look at
some ideas to address each of these performance areas, but notice, their use
must be interwoven with purpose into conversations and opportunities to
co-construct knowledge. Assessing growth in these areas requires authentic
use, within academic conversation.

1. Vocabulary Usage

• When
determining key vocabulary, divide words into content and technical terms, by
word parts, and general academic processes we may take for granted.
High-utility words are those used for instructions or prompts that you sense
may negate a student’s understanding when it’s really the question he cannot
understand (i.e., describe, define, identify, manipulate, analyze, complete).
(Check out learning and memory specialist Marilee Sprenger’s 55 critical words, her 10-Minute Vocabulary, or the Institute
of Education Sciences' strategies on developing ELLs' academic
vocabulary.)

• Model how words
are used within sentence structures, especially common collocations, then
maintain explicit expectations until students can produce the expected level
independently. Collocations are words commonly used together
in English, but can be difficult to translate, such as “catch a cold” or “catch
someone’s eye,” phrasal verbs like “dress up,” or idioms like “pay an arm and a
leg.”

• Do your
students a favor and teach them about code-switching or linguistic register, or
how to adapt their use of language to conform to the standards in any given
professional or social situation. To demonstrate how audience impacts both oral
and written language, have them “text” what they learned to a friend, create a
lesson about it for kindergartners, and then write a summary for the
principal’s eyes. This lends credence to their own register, while highlighting
the routine code-switching we do daily. Academic language is a more formal
register which can provide them with intellectual and linguistic power.

• Highlight
affixes, root words, and cognates within texts, display them on word walls, use
in discussions, and create expectations of their use to enhance students'
metalinguistic awareness. Puns, wordplay, and words that have multiple meanings
are also fun tools for boosting intellectual curiosity.

2. Linguistic Complexity

• Reading and
writing must be combined with explicit practice in listening along with various
oral opportunities to use new vocabulary and increasingly complex grammar.
Provide experiences for students to share ideas, co-construct new knowledge,
and use vocabulary to communicate big ideas and deeper thinking rather than
filling in blanks. Plus, if they can say it, you can be sure it helps them
write it.

• Using conversation skills not only helps clarify
ideas, but also helps develop an understanding of grammar and word
combinations. Students develop conversational pragmatics, those hidden social
norms of conversation including turn-taking, respecting physical space, picking
up on paralinguistic cues, and appropriate ways to agree, disagree, and build
upon each other’s thoughts, in a variety of realistic situations.

• I’ve learned
the hard way that rich contexts are imperative for students to want to
negotiate meaning, think critically, and co-construct meaningful ideas during
partner or group interactions. Provide information gaps, jigsaw readings, and
provocative essential questions, because we want students to understand that
conversations are multi-sided, a tool for learning, and vital for navigating
larger tasks. Monitor structured partner interactions in every
lesson, using them as formative assessments, with consistent expectations of
precise language and grammar usage.

• Bring attention
to differences between written and spoken discourse and common usage in
different content areas, such as the use of passive tense in history and
science (“it was written”) and nominalization where verbs or adjectives
become noun forms (“they destroyed it” versus “resulted in the
destruction of”).

Students like
Moses need appropriate language targets with multiple and wide-ranging
opportunities to use language to demonstrate their understanding and knowledge.
School is the only place many of our students are likely to hear, use, or
produce academic language, and to learn how context brings meaning to language.

When we use
language, we make choices based on connections and power relationships with
others, formal versus informal needs, and the intended outcome of the
interaction. It’s worth our time to explain this to students, and to explain
further that societal assumptions are made based upon the choices we make with
our word usage, not our knowledge alone. It is our role to model academic
language use when we speak and write, and to ensure that above all else, all
students are actively participating and producing purposeful language each and
every day. What can you tweak so this happens in your lessons tomorrow?

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

As Lois Guisbond suggests (The Answer Sheet, 12/19/16), the opt-out movement's effort to reduce testing seemed to work. Responding to parental pressure, President Obama recommended a decrease in standardized testing. But as bloggers Peggy Robertson, Morna McDermott, and Emily Talmage warned us over a year ago, the Empire was already poised to strike back.

Three days after the president's speech (Oct. 24, 2015), the National Governors Association (NGA) issued a paper strongly supporting Competency-Based Education (CBE) (or "computer-based adaptive assessment"), a radical and expensive innovation that replaces regular instruction with online "modules" that students work through independently and then are tested on.

The NGA shrugged off the fact that research is lacking: "it includes only a few rigorous evaluations and analyses …" (NGA report, p. 6): The new education law, the "Every Student Succeeds Act." announced grants for "innovative assessments," explicitly mentioning Competency-Based Education.

CBE will dominate the curriculum, and CBE tests will be the basis for student, teacher, and school evaluation, transferring the responsibility of education to distant strangers who design computer programs. President Obama's call for a limit on standardized testing may have been a convenient first step toward something much worse than end-of-the-year testing: testing all the time.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Comment published in NY Times comments section on "Forget ‘Pat the
Bunny.’ My Child Is Reading Hemingway" (Dec. 18, 2016).http://tinyurl.com/jlgjuty

Stephen Krashen

Several of those who have commented on this article point out that
classic comics tried to do something similar to re-casted classics for tots:
Make classics more comprehensible to younger readers.

There is evidence that they were not very popular with children.

Wayne (1954) asked 297 seventh-grade students to indicate which
comic types they preferred; each student was asked to choose four from a list
of 15. Classic comics ranked ninth out of 15.

When are asked which comics they prefer, without a list to choose
from, class comics are never mentioned (for a review of these studies, seeWitty
and Sizemore 1954).

Michael Dirda shares his enthusiasm for comic books, but tells us
“I never really cottoned to the earnest and didactic ‘classic comics’ … Who
would pick up something called The
Cloister and the Hearth ….?” (Dirda, 2003, p. 56).

Monday, December 19, 2016

The goal of this paper is not to
discourage the study of Latin. It is, rather, part of an effort to distinguish
valid reasons for being interested in Latin from bogus reasons.

There is some evidence supporting the
idea that the study of Latin helps with the subsequent study of Romance
languages, but the effect appears to be small and temporary.I divide the research into three categories:

NO DIFFERENCE OR NEGATIVE EFFECT

Starch (1915) found very little difference
in first-year French grades, freshman English grades, and overall grades in
modern languages in college between those who studied Latin and those who
studied German in high school.

Haag and Stern (2003) found that students
of Spanish with previous French study made fewer errors in translating from
their first language (German) into Spanish than those who had previously
studied an equivalent amount of Latin.

SMALL EFFECT

Kirby (1923) found low correlations
between years of high school Latin study and first semester college grades in
French (r = .22, meaning that knowing a student's high school grade in Latin
provides about 5% of the information needed to predict the student's French
grade). The relationship to second semester French grades was about the same (r
= .25). (1)

TEMPORARY EFFECT

In agreement with Kirby, Henman (1924;
cited in Jordan, 1942, p. 290) found a small advantage for those who had
studied Latin for French vocabulary and grammar, but this small advantage was
not present at the end of the second year.

Swift (cited in Starch, 1930; pp.
230-231) studied only the impact of previous Latin study on Spanish class
performance in high school for 15 weeks. Swift found that the impact was
obvious on weekly tests given the first week, but by the 15th week, the
no-Latin students had made up about 2/3 of the difference.

Conclusions

The studies reviewed here lead to the
conclusion that Latin study cannot be justified because it helps with other
Romance languages. The impact is small and wears off.

I suspect that experience with any other
Romance language will help with another, but exposure to the desired target
language itself will be even more useful. If you want to acquire French,the most efficient path is to take a good
French class or find other sources of comprehensible input in French, not Latin
or Spanish (2).

NOTES:

1. Cole (1924) also reported modest
correlations betwen years of high school Latin study and first and second
semester French grades in college (r = .36), and beetween years of Latin study
in high school and first and second semester Spanish grades in college (r =
.24). in all Cole's analyses, the effect
of measured IQ was controlled. Cole's sample, however, did not represent a fair
test of the effect of Latin, since nearly all Frency stdents had two years or
more of Latin in high school and all Spanish students had at least two years of
Latin.This incomplete distrbution may
have attenuated the actual correlation.

2. It needs to be pointed out that in all
the studies cited here, both Latin and other Romance languages, were taught
using traditional methods.There is no
research I know of examining the effect of Latin taught with a
compehension-based approach on other languages taught with traditional or
comprehension-based approaches.

References:

Cole, L.E. 1924.
Latin as a preparatin for French and Spanish.School and Society 29 (491): 618-622.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

There are excellent reasons for the study
of Latin in schools, including the rich culture, literature, and history of Rome, as well as the opportunity to see the results
of language change and borrowing, and the chance to study the litergical use of
language.

But it is not clear that improving
students' English vocabulary is a good reasons for studying Latin. Studies done over the last century confirm
that students who study Latin do better on tests of English vocabulary (1, 2).The effect, however, may be swamped by
another, far more efficient way of building vocabulary.

In every study of the impact of Latin,
the tests of English vocabulary were given soon after Latin study ended, typically
at the end of the academic year. There are no studies confirming the impact of
Latin study in school on adult vocabulary later in life. In fact, there is
reason to suspect that this impact may not exist for dedicated readers or be
very weak.

There is strong evidence that
self-selected reading for pleasure is a powerful predictor of adult vocabulary,
no matter when it is done during the lifespan (up to age 42 that is; Sullivan
and Brown2014): Reading for pleasure,
especially fiction, is a significant predictor of adult vocabulary size, and
there is no critical age – more reading as an adult is strongly related to
vocabulary size, controlling for earlier reading.

In other words, older readers who
continue to read for pleasure and interest continue to increase their vocabularies.
There are no studies I know of directly comparing the long-term effect of Latin
study in school on vocabulary with the development of a reading habit. (But see appendix 1.)

What needs to be investigated: Does Latin
study in school havea positive impact
on adult vocabulary size independent of pleasure reading?In other words, given two equally well-read
adults, one who has studied Latin and one who has not not, will the former
Latin student have a larger vocabulary?My prediction is that the amount of reading will predict vocabulary
size, but that Latin study will make no significant additional
contribution.

I am suggesting, in other words, that the
power of reading alone is so strong that Latin study will make little
difference.This is, of course, only a
prediction that needs to be confirmed by research, but if it is true, the
argument that Latin is a vocabulary enhancer is only valid in the short run.

Appendix 1

Starch (1930) presents data that supports
the prediction that the effect of Latin study wears off, but only compares high
school juniors and college students, the sample is small, and no significance
testing was done. Nevertheless, the trend is clear: University students have
larger vocabulary test scores than high school students, and the "Latin
advantage" is smaller for them (2% versus 4.5%). In fact, university students with no Latin did
better than high schools who had Latin.

level

n

Latin

percent

University

139

yes

60.9

University

50

no

58.9

HS junior

14

yes

54.7

HS junior

32

no

50.2

From Starch, 1930, table 61.

Bowker (1975), also discussed in footnote one, reported that high-school students with two years of Latin study outscored those without Latin study, but the difference was modest, only 6% on a 150 item test: On a subset of the test contained only Latin-derived words, the Latin student advantage was only 2%.

My hypothesis is that
a reading habit will eventually wipe out any advantage for Latin study on
English vocabulary. This hypothesis also
predicts that there will be less of a Latin advantage if students have
developed a pleasure reading habit. These privledged private school students
most likely had the advantage of a print-rich environment, and most likely many
were dedicated pleasure readers, which explains the weak results for Latin
study.

Notes.

1: The earliest studies I could find were
Harris (1915) and Otis (1922). Some additional details about the studies:Bassman and Ironsmith (1984) claim that Latin
study resulted in "significantly greater gains in vocabulary than did the
control students" (p. 41). But a close look at the data shows that the
control students made no gain at all over the academic year, and the gain for
the Latin students was about a normal year's growth (effect size = .31 on the
Vocabulary Portion of Stanford Achievement Test).

In some studies, vocabulary tests
contained only words of Latin origin (e.g.Otis, 1922) and in some studies the list was not restricted, but Latin
origin words make up about half of
English vocabulary (Fromchuck, 1984; Barber, 1985). Strangely, the Latin advantage for Bowker's subjects, high school students from a private school, was larger for a test containing both Latin origin and non-Latin origin words than for only the Latin origin subset. Latin students had only a 2% advantage over non-Latin students on the subset.

2. Could the Latin
advantage be due to pre-existing differences between those who take Latin and
those who do not?If this were the case,
we would expect thatthose taking Latin
as an elective would score better on English vocabulary tests than those who
did not on tests given before Latin instruction begins.. There is evidence that
this is true (Carr, 1921; Wilcox, 1917), but it was also the case that the gap
between the groups increased with Latin study (Carr, 1921; Wilcox, 1917).

Also, when students
are matched for initial competence, some researchers report that Latin still
has a positive effect on vocabulary test scores (Carr, 1919; Perkins, 1914, who matched for English and
foreign language grades; Paroughian, 1942, matched for IQ).

In contrast,
Douglass and Kittelson (1935) matched students for SES, years of foreign
language study, and English grades, and reported that Latin made only a small,
but positive difference on an English vocabulary test, and Pond (1938), who
also matched students on a variety of factors, reported similar results.

In summary, Latin
students could indeed have an initial advantage, but Latin study still appears
to have a positive effect on scores of English vocabulary tests.

3: It has been argued that the Latin
advantage comes from knowledge of Latin roots and affixes. But the effect of
context on comprehension (clues to meaning outside the word) may be more
powerful than knowledge ofroots and
suffixes (clues to meaning inside the word).

Even if knowledge of roots and affixes
are of significant help to young readers, it is likely that well-read adults
who have never studied Latin will have acquired much ofthis knowledge through reading.